Alethea Maguire-Cruz is a fine artist and college educator who was born in Connecticut, where her artist/educator parents taught nearby at the original Barlow School, in Amenia, New York. She studied fine art at the University of Delaware (1995 MFA/GTA); incorporating graduate study as a Julin Scholar at the University of Iowa, and completed her undergraduate degree at SUNY Purchase (1993 BFA); including a semester overseas at the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, Academie Beeldende Voorming. A steadfast traveler; she continues to seek locations that inform her landscape paintings, drawings and prints. Currently she teaches full-time as a Professor of Graphic Design/Fine Art/Film Media at Berkeley College, and has taught at the University of Delaware, Long Island University/Post, SUNY Nassau, Pratt Institute Associate Degree Programs, Central Wyoming College, Delta College, Mid Michigan Community College, and periodically teaches at SUNY Westchester and SUNY Rockland.

Notably, she has exhibited at such venues as the Scarab Club, Hankins Gallery, Paperworks Gallery, Ford Gallery and Saginaw Art Museum in Michigan, the Steinberg Museum of Art at Hillwood, Hudson River Fine Art, Green Kill, Contemporary Art Network/Midtown West Art Associates in New York, additionally exhibiting in South America, Greece and the Netherlands. She is represented by Longyear Gallery and Artifact also in New York. Her collectors are international. Residencies at the Woodstock School of Art, Vermont Studio Center and Cill Rialaig Arts Centre in Ireland, have further suffused her landscape paintings. She has interviewed for diverse publications, television and radio; most recently for CEO Tom Mallow of The Cultural Review/UK Radio, has drawings published in Songs of Mute Eagles, poems by Arthur Gatti, and has been featured in John Sebastian’s The New York Optimist.

Artist Statement:

With deep empathy for the Earth, my observations center primarily on the reaction and reclamation of nature. Aware of the wrestle between entropy and geometry, at odds within the landscape, I seek remote locations where atmospheric occurrences clash. More wild than tame, I visit places that can be intuited, having a definitive character or placehood. Often I meet with a space of natural phenomena that echoes expansion.

Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, England, Ireland, Iceland… and extensive Canadian/Stateside travel have been errant accomplices in my work. On these excursions I look for diffusion, where patterns of sky, land and sea interlock, lift, fold, dissolve or collapse. Witnessing climate has proven to showcase meteorological phantoms such as virga, corona, parhelia, supercell, cumulonimbus, roll clouds, microbursts, meteor showers, sprites, luminous plasma and ionospheric lightning that at times, levitate the frontier.

Since it is such a pleasure to track textural and parabolic rhythms that surface over time from strata in wood or stone to wind-disturbed plains, I further experiment with altered formats such as trapezoids, sectors, circles, quadrants, irregular polygons and arc-segments, integrating vanishing points that may act to energize the shifting, if not haptic horizon. Landscape is an outpost: obscure and omniscient, a collision of alchemical elements that I work to apprehend, with regard for its defiance.